Tarapaca project in the Atacama desert aims to
develop an intervention strategy to recover damaged heritage. The town devastated by 2005 earthquake is
a key part of popular devotion, its annual parade gathers a hundred thousand people from all over
Atacama in a pilgrimage that transcend borders.
What was lost was irreproducible. It had been built
over centuries by peoples and crafts long forgotten: Then how to restore the towns heritage not as a
monument, but as a heritage compound. Our approach was to interpret ‘heritage values’ as an
abstract quality featured by traditional architecture. It was the spatiality that propitiates every-day’s life
rituals, the constructive adequacy to climate, the crafts and materials what had to be drawn to the the
context of contemporary production.